Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Boy was that a mistake that I regret making. Last week, we saw the release of the new “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie on Netflix, another attempt at making a direct sequel to the original movie. How is this compared to the last time they tried this?

Shorter than the atrocious prequel, but filled with references to the current cultural climate and characters who work outside the area of wisdom, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” borrows the notes of its classic predecessor while misunderstanding the work, ending with what really feels like a spoof of the franchise. As a direct sequel to the 1974 original (the film ignores the seven films in the franchise released since) it makes the fundamental tragedy that made the original long-lasting, switching it with a functional slasher story that carries its opinions about millennials with all the subtlety of a chainsaw going through someone.

Both films follow a group of teenagers who travel to remote Texas, only to encounter the chainsaw-murdering cannibal Leatherface, played by Mark Burnham. Gayle Sequeira said in her review, “The original, however, recontextualised the horror genre by moving the focus away from the terror inflicted by the perpetrator, and emphasising the tragedy of his victims’ deaths, rendered even more affecting by their youth. In that film, the teens’ gory ends only came about because of their trusting nature. Set against the sweltering Texas summer, they exhibited the guilelessness of those in the spring of their youth. They picked up a hitchhiker in a strange part of the country, looked to planets in retrograde to make sense of their lives and didn’t think twice before seeking shelter at an abandoned house. As desperate as viewers might have been to get them to reconsider their plans, they couldn’t fault their obliviousness — who thinks about death in the prime of their life?”

On the other hand, the sequel, keeps to make its characters (Elsie Fisher, Nell Hudson, Sarah Yarkin and Jacob Latimore) as unlikeable as possible, casting them as the lifeless criminals of improvement and late-stage capitalism. When they travel to the Texas town of Harlow, wanting to renovate and sell its properties to influencers, a Black character doesn’t express pain when seeing a Confederate flag, but at the idea of his challenged investors seeing it. Sequeira said, “While details like these mark the Netflix film as firmly of this time, it goes on to shorten its shelf-life by dropping references to that viral ‘feral hogs’ tweet and threats to ‘cancel’ its villain, lines that while briefly amusing will only make the film seem like a period piece soon, given how fast internet culture shifts. The original, in contrast, stands alone as a timeless horror movie, its Vietnam War context and allusions to the rise of automation only visible upon closer inspection.”

Now, nearly 50 years later, Leatherface gets into action when the group forcibly removes his adoptive mother, played by Alice Krige, the stress kills her. Sequeira noted, “This decision to humanise the franchise’s famous villain deflates much of the tension he carried back when he was just a mute symbol of doom. Is telling viewers that a man, who surgically peels off people’s faces to wear as a mask, also happens to love his mother supposed to elicit sympathy for him?” It's unclear.

However, one of the biggest problems cursing the Netflix film is the lack of texture. Sequeira said, “The standard Netflix sheen is omnipresent, whether the camera is capturing decrepit buildings or suffocating rows of cornfields. The original, on the other hand, was characterised by a visceral sense of the flesh and its fragility, from the opening closeups of gnarled hand tissue, to the hitchhiker who unnervingly cut his palm open in front of the horrified group.” By the time the first kill happens, director Tobe Hooper didn’t need to zoom into the violence. Just the long-drawn-out sound of the chainsaw accelerating was powerful enough. The sequel is generous with the CGI blood splashing, but approaches the violence routinely, with a cop being stabbed with his own swollen bone the only example of originality. Sequeira noted, “It’s in bringing back its original Final Girl Sally Hardesty (originally played by Marilyn Burns, now by Olwen Fouéré) that the film demonstrates its lack of ideas, recasting her from an unwitting lamb to the slaughter to a hardened avenger, a character turn that doesn’t land. It’s not the only characterisation that doesn’t make sense, given that a survivor of a school shooting finds catharsis by choosing to perpetuate gun violence too.”

Sequeira continued, “A sequence in which the events of the original film become fodder for a cheesy true-crime-style recreation in this one is perhaps what best encapsulates the writers’ approach — an irreverent reworking of source material.” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” makes itself related to the original, but can’t replicate the power.

I’m sorry, but this is one of the worst installments in the franchise. I just feel like this was really late in the chainsaw kills, the kills were just there as mindless blood gushing, which weren’t effective, and it’s just a horror film that is poorly executed. Horror films nowadays don’t leave the same impact that they used to a long time ago. Now they just seem like mindless and just overusing the blood and kills. If you have been fond of the franchise, don’t see this one, even though it is on Netflix. This is just not worth it.

Thank you for joining in on my thoughts of this film tonight. Stay tuned what I will review next month.